[csaa-forum] Reminder: EOIs and CFP on 'listening'

[Tanja Dreher]

A reminder that abstracts for a refereed publication and expressions of 
interest for participation in workshops on the theme of 'listening' are 
due this Friday, 29 February.

THE LISTENING PROJECT
 
Tanja Dreher, Justine Lloyd and Penny O'Donnell, Project Convenors
 
The Listening Project is a program of collaboration that will generate sustained discussion and publication around the politics, technologies and practices of the cultural literacy of ‘listening’. The project develops a new area of study through an innovative model of networking, bringing together researchers across a range of disciplines as well as media and cultural producers. The program will examine the neglected dynamics of ‘listening’, an emerging focus in Media Studies and citizens’ media interventions. Habitual critiques of representation and the politics of ‘speaking’ (or giving voice to the voiceless) are giving way to investigation of more active possibilities for social inclusion and change based on recognition, dialogic engagement and acceptance.

ROUNDTABLE WORKSHOPS
Five afternoon tea workshops will be held in 2008, leading to a multi-authored publication around the theme of ‘listening’ in 2009. For each workshop, the convenors and 2 – 3 invited participants will be asked to prepare a brief and informal discussion starter, which might take the form of a commentary on existing literature or research, or a discussion of a particular project, research methodology etc. The discussion will be structured to lead to the identification of potential collaborative projects and papers for publication.

MEDIA & THE POLITICS OF LISTENING IN MULTICULTURAL SOCIETIES
16 April 2008, UNSW
Tanja Dreher (UTS) and Gay Hawkins (UNSW)
 
DISABILITY, DEMOCRACY, MEDIA & LISTENING
13 August 2008, UNSW
Gerard Goggin (UNSW) and Christopher Newell (UTas)
 
TECHNOLOGIES OF LISTENING
August 2008, UTS
Justine Lloyd (Macq) and Kate Crawford (UNSW)
 
CONFLICT, DEMOCRACY & LISTENING
26 September 2008, Monash
Mark Gibson (Monash)

LISTENING PRACTICES
17 October 2008, Usyd
Penny O'Donnell (Usyd) and Juan Salazar (UWS)

PUBLICATION WORKSHOP
14 November 2008, UTS
If you wish to participate in The Listening Project, email Cate Thill (Catherine.Thill at uts.edu.au <mailto:Catherine.Thill at uts.edu.au>). If you would like to attend a workshop, please send a statement indicating in 200 words or less why you are interested in a specific workshop topic and whether or not you are doing related research, as well as a short CV (4 page max). Alternatively, if you are interested in contributing to a proposed publication on the theme of listening, please send a short abstract and outline of a paper on one of the workshop topics. The deadline for expressions of interest in workshops and the publication is 29 February 2008.

Early career, regional and rural researchers are strongly encouraged to apply.

There is a small amount of funding available for interstate travel to the workshops that will be allocated on a competitive basis. Please indicate in your application if you are interested in applying for funding.

The Listening Project is supported by the Australian Research Council’s Cultural Research Network and the Trans/forming Cultures Research Centre at the University of Technology Sydney

WORKSHOPS

MEDIA & THE POLITICS OF LISTENING IN MULTICULTURAL SOCIETIES
16 April 2008, UNSW
Tanja Dreher (UTS) and Gay Hawkins (UNSW)

This workshop will focus on the ethics and politics of listening in order to develop innovative approaches to thinking about media and multiculturalism. To date both research and policy on media and cultural diversity have emphasised questions of speaking, whether in mainstream, community or diaspora media. There is also a vast literature examining questions of representation including stereotyping, racialisation, hybridisation and self-representations. This workshop extends these discussions to focus on questions of listening. Sociologist Charles Husband has long argued that the 'right to be understood' and an ethics of listening are as important as the 'right to communicate' in developing a multi-ethnic public sphere. Susan Bickford suggests that 'just as speakers must reflect on how to speak (and what to say), listeners must be self-conscious about how they listen (and what they hear). Taking responsibility for listening, as an active and creative process, might serve to 
undermine certain hierarchies of language and voice'.
Attention to listening provokes important questions about media and multiculturalism: How do media enable or constrain listening across difference? What is the role of mediation in the politics of listening? How can a diversity of voices be heard in the media? How are new modes of listening developed or learned (by media producers and by media audiences)? How can media researchers, producers and policymakers best address these questions?

By bringing together researchers, media workers and policy makers we aim to start a conversation on new ways of understanding the dynamics and importance of listening in multicultural societies.

DISABILITY, DEMOCRACY, MEDIA & LISTENING
13 August 2008, UNSW
Gerard Goggin (UNSW) and Christopher Newell (UTas)

In rich and suggestive senses, listening has emerged as a pivotal theme in contemporary, critical understandings of disability. Accordingly this workshop seeks to explore the practices, ethics and politics of listening from the perspective of critical disability studies, new social forms and relations of disability, the reshaping of disability institutions, and the movements around disability. Thinking about disability and listening has much potential to open up fertile new ways to conceive democracy and media -- and to challenge, and cross-fertilize, discussions of recognition, inclusion, social change, power, citizenship, culture, and indeed the nature of what is to be human.
 
TECHNOLOGIES OF LISTENING
August 2008, UTS
Justine Lloyd (Macq) and Kate Crawford (UNSW)

This workshop will allow for the investigation of the crucial role of technology in listening. The focus will be on the cultural forms of listening that bring together material objects with social practices, collective formations and subjectivities. The emphasis on listening will allow participants to explore common themes and problems: to what extent have technologies embodied already existing modes of listening and to what extent do they produce new ones? What sonic networks and flows do contemporary material cultures reinforce, and how do local sound cultures redraw and reconstitute themselves in a digital environment? What is the function of shared spaces of listening in relation to individual environments, such as MP3 players and mobile phones?
 
CONFLICT, DEMOCRACY & LISTENING
26 September 2008, Monash
Mark Gibson (Monash)

It is difficult to conceive of democracy without a belief in the possibility of listening. But over the last twenty years, the theme of listening has increasingly been displaced by those of power and conflict. While the latter are often associated with the left, they have also been taken up by the right, resulting in interesting resonances between cultural studies analyses of ‘discursive strategies’ and conservative campaigns against political correctness. This workshop considers the prospects for restoring a place for listening in the wake of the culture wars. Has the displacement of listening been a temporary phenomenon or does it have structural roots? Are ‘conflict’ and ‘listening’ really mutually exclusive themes? What are the most promising sites for new models of listening? To what extent might they be generalised?
 
LISTENING PRACTICES
17 October 2008, Usyd
Penny O'Donnell (Usyd) and Juan Salazar (UWS)

This workshop will examine different listening practices with the aim of developing our capacity to both experience and theorise more open forms of communication. It will provide a space and time for listening. Participants will be encouraged to collaborate in the development of a shared archive of listening practices by bringing along exemplars of things people do and say in relation to media and listening.
Listening, speaking, practice, recognition, agency and justice are key categories in this workshop. It is concerned with the significance of listening in media culture: What type of things do people do in relation to media and listening? What do media practitioners do? What is media-oriented listening, and what are people listening for? What types of things do people say in relation to media and listening? What do media practioners say? Is listening displacing speaking/voice as the metaphor for ‘democratic’ media participation and reform? If, as we suspect, listening is emerging as a distinctive media-oriented activity then we should be able to find observable examples of it; examples that provide a means for thinking about and evaluating the realities, rationales, rules and significance of listening practices.

The global political context provides an interesting reference point for this exercise. Media sociologist Nick Couldry (2006) suggests the global media system is an ‘institutionalised injustice’, generating an important, shared public space but only at the cost of fomenting conflicts born of the system’s characteristic and profound inequalities in the distribution of symbolic resources and media power. In the face of this injustice, media presence has become a primary means by which states, groups and individuals seek and achieve recognition and agency, that is, ways of ‘speaking out’ or ‘speaking back’ to the system. Yet, one way or another, the broader aim is justice rather than just increasing media flow/volume and, hence, the risk of cacophony. This raises the interesting question of whether media-oriented listening offers a stronger path not only to recognition and agency but also to justice?


------------------------------------------------
Dr Tanja Dreher
ARC Postdoctoral Fellow
Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences
University of Technology, Sydney
PO Box 123
Broadway NSW 2007
Email: tanja.dreher at uts.edu.au
Phone: (02) 9514 1671



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